I can feel so incredibly self-conscious when I’m playing slow songs. Maybe that’s why I tend to speed up so many tempos early in the life of my songs. Case and point – “Something Real” and “Tangling,” which felt impossibly sparse as I was playing them and on re-listen sound just find. “Tangling,” especially, almost never retains its tempo throughout, and most old CK recordings at it are nearly twice as fast as this one.

“Real You” is a unique one in almost every respect – the acoustic hard-rocking, the singing style, the half-open discordant barres. It’s one of my loudest songs straight-through, with the exception of the first line in the bridge. I’ve never seen myself play it before, nor have I played it through compression before. What a difference! I have some work to do to strengthen my chest to falsetto transition on the choruses.

You’re going to keep seeing more of “Saving Grace” and “Shake It Off,” the latter because I am going to keep playing it until I get it right, the former because it’s nearly in the same tuning and also one of EV’s favorites. I’m getting closer to remembering how to play “Saving Grace” in that original tuning.

I write crazy bridges. This is fact. I manage to cobble together something resembling the right thing in “Unengaged” by focusing on getting the roots right, but I’m totally lost for two whole minutes in “Naturally” before I find the roots again (although if you hang in there I kind of sort of get there eventually and manage to finish the song).

It’s a shame, since otherwise it was a solid first recording of an impossibly hard-to-play song I’ve been rehearsing for six years now. I suspect you’ll be seeing more of it in the near future.

I originally wrote “Saving Grace” at the piano (it was pretty much the first thing I did when we walked in the door from our honeymoon), and when I finally translated it to guitar it was in the peculiar tuning of CADGCC. I still prefer the chord voicings there, but when we brought it to Arcati Crisis it didn’t make sense for me to always retune for just one song, so I figured out the equivalent chords in standard tuning.

One of the many downfalls of constant returning – especially retuning with such slack strings, is that even if your guitar sounds find on an open strum that the intonation might go a little sour higher on the next. If you see me wincing through “Saving Grace” and “Shake It Off” here, it’s because somewhere in the 7-9th fret neighborhood I heard something a little wonky.

(Also, as I mention in the stream, this is my first time ever hearing a soundboard quality “Shake It Off” played back not just through monitors, which is pretty crazy considering I wrote it back in 2009.)

“Picture Window” is another song I wrote first on piano and then translated, although I think the guitar version has nearly replaced the original for me at this point. “Wilted” is an older tune that’s a particular favorite of E’s – I was a little confused about the placement of the slides up the neck for about halfway through the song. Such is rehearsal.

That brings us to my current wrestling match, “Ugly Americans.” On day eight of its life in public it’s getting nearer to a final state, though there are still a few too many words crowding some of the triplets. It’s literally been over a decade since I’ve worked out a new song in public like this, and while it’s terrifying it also feels good to be back to my roots. The fear will fade.

I intended to follow that with an oldie, “Hold On Me,” and then some grand finalé – which I intended to be “Better” (which, crazily, I’ve never recorded solo!) but would probably result in EV yelling for “Status Quo” and me acquiescing.

Good news and bad news about this week’s Live @ Rehearsal broadcast from my Facebook page.

Good news: I figured out how to do it with soundboard quality audio and, most importantly when it comes to my personal dynamic range, compression.

Bad news: I chose Tuesday night to stream, and the election internet traffic (combined with some router issues) slowed the broadcast to a crawl at points. So, this isn’t too fun to watch, but it’s a solid listen!

Just a few this week, since I’m already focused on improving the audio and video quality for next time.

This is one of my first live runs through “Dirigible,” a deeply weird song that is what happens when I try to write like Gina does for Arcati Crisis. It’s about hot-air ballooning over a world covered in water, maybe figuratively or maybe literally. It’s still a little shaky, but I’m getting close to it being able to hold its own.

It’s also maybe my first internet play-through of “Message,” a song that I love and that we briefly worked up for the band. It’s actually maybe written by Madonna, but in a dream, so you can’t possibly serve me with a DMCA notice about it. I’ll write a better story about it when I have a better video of it, but you can hear it all in the recording. I have some timing issues playing it here without the band, but I think the vocal is pretty strong.

“My Heart” and “Are You” are both returned from many years on ice, although I play the former a lot just because it’s fun to sing. “End With Me” and “Curves Sketched In Letters” are, of course, my twin songs from Eric Smith’s Textual Healing, which have become setlist staples. There’s another song from those writing sessions I’ve never played before – perhaps it will make an appearance soon!

Also? I don’t ever want to play “Regenerate” without compression again. What a difference it makes on a song like that that goes from my lower chest range up to a belt at the top of my mixed voice.

After a month of piloting Facebook Live lunch rehearsal concerts to my network of friends, this week I unveiled them on my Facebook page!

Setlist: Shake It Of w/Shake Your Body Down (to the ground), A Few Bars of Goodbye, Saving Grace, a totally off-the-cuff and unrehearsed cover of Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons, Bucket Seat, Saving Grace, and a special encore duet with EV on We Are The Crystal Gems (the theme from Steven Universe)

Performance Notes:

With my first solo performance in a LONG time under my belt two weekends ago, I’m starting to get a feel for my solo repertoire again.

For me the standout here is “Status Quo.” I invoked it in this year’s anniversary post, and this is one of the strongest versions of it I’ve performed. It has all sorts of extra ornamentation I’ve never done before. Definitely wish I had that one in studio quality!

“Shake It Off” was a decent rendition, and I’m starting to get the muscle back to pull off three whole minutes of those hammers (seriously, it’s a workout).

I was really focused on keeping “A Few Bars of Goodbye” on the slower side since I tend to gain speed on songs in 3, but the tempo focus distracted me from some of the lyrics. That said, it’s great to hear it at the right speed (and I got the final chord right)!

“Million Reasons” was a bit of a train-wreck, but that’s the fun of doing this live and not as some big studio project where such things would never sneak through. Early Trios featured plenty of beautiful wrecks. I need to take the key slightly up from there to get to a better place in my range for sustained notes – you can hear how much trouble I’m having with breath management. It’s a statement to how damn good the song is that the quality still shows through my shaky performance.

As for the pair of Arcati Crisis songs, “Saving Grace” and “Bucket Seat,” I’ll simply say the transition to doing that material sans the incomparable Zina on drums hasn’t been the easiest.

##

FB Live presented an interesting technical challenge, because FB offers nary a means of broadcasting video from a desktop device. I tried for a few weeks by using my phone, but discovered that the cap on its WiFi upstreaming capabilities meant that live music just didn’t sound great.

After a bit of research, I found a magnificent walkthrough on JoelComm.com that explained desktop-based streaming and even included an applet to generate your streaming key! Once I installed the excellent open-source software OBS I was ready to stream (the next best solution is hundreds of dollars).

The next hurdle is achieving studio-quality sound. The sheer volume of me clips any standard cellphone or laptop mic, plus those mics aren’t great with dealing with reflections and echo and can make even the most pitch-conscious singer (which I am not) seem out of tune. Unfortunately, OBS doesn’t play very nicely with my studio setup, or else this would already be a solved problem. It’s a work in progress.

We held an unusual rehearsal in our dining room today – three hours of running through the Smash Fantastic cover song repertoire, but as fronted by my Arcati Crisis co-writer and BFF Gina.

An incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind shot of the first time Gina and I performed music together on stage (also the first time I sang solo in public!) This was in 1997 at Masterman, peforming “Sharks Can’t Sleep” by Tracy Bonham. From left to right: me, Joanna, Lucy, and Gina.

The strange arrangement is the result of being asked to play a big benefit show during a week where Ashley will be on vacation. It’s a fun show and we love donating our time to it, so Ashley gave her blessing for us to play it with a fill-in vocalist.

Despite you all knowing Gina primarily for her amazing songwriting and intuitive harmony vocals, she is an awesome interpreter and karaoke veteran. It helps that the rest of the band – Jake, Zina, and I – is the same for both Smash Fantastic and Arcati Crisis.

It was a rollicking rehearsal full of surprises – for example, after over 20 years of friendship I found out that Gina loves “Because The Night” as much as I do, but she does not quite know how to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.” We also played a rare pair of our own “Holy Grail” and “Better” with Gina on vocals but not on guitars!

The most interesting part for me was the conversation while we packed up. As we were coiling wires, Gina mentioned off-handedly that she found getting the cover songs right to be much more challenging than playing in an original band.

That took me by surprise! Gina is a confident, experienced singer – I would never expect she would be stressed by cover songs. In fact, I invited her to fill in because I thought she’d find singing two hours of covers a relief in comparison to the stress of shredding through our own songs. However, her reasoning resonated: when you’re covering a song, there’s an existing standard to be held to. As great an interpreter as you may be, you’ve got to get the lyrics right and hit the expected high notes before people will even begin to consider if your performance is any good.

I know that’s the reality, but I’ve never considered it that way. For me, cover songs are a fun vacation from the intense challenge of playing original music.

With cover songs, you simply have to capture the spirit of a song people know well. While Jake tends to hew closely to the real basslines of songs, Zina and I approximate their drum fills and guitar riffs. It’s about verisimilitude. If you give a crowd a hint of the real thing, they don’t notice all the elements you leave out.

That works in our favor on songs for which we can’t quite assemble all the elements of a recording, but it also works in our favor – our covers of “Bang Bang” and “Uptown Funk” dress up the more bare originals considerably with additional passing chords, while even on a classic like “The Way You Make Me Feel” Jake has installed a more propulsive bassline that is only implied in the original.

The first time Gina and I played guitar together in front of people! This was in 1998 at Masterman, playing U2’s “With Or Without You” for the departing senior class. Psychedelic water damage courtesy of my Sophomore year apartment.

By contrast, playing originals is terrifying! The only context the audience has are the notes coming from the stage. There is no earned good will or existing song that will put a smile on their face. And, even when you’re in top shape with a set of good songs, it’s impossible to know when they’re good enough.

It’s like doing yoga – you can always challenge yourself to sink deeper into a pose. I have songs that are nearly 20 years old that I still haven’t mastered playing; I found extra harmony on one just a few weeks ago that makes it sound more like itself than it ever has before.

Gina doesn’t have that anxiety. To her, an original song is something entirely under her control not only to interpret, but to shape and transform. The entire point of the thing is that it belongs to you and it might continue to evolve. That’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s a joy.

I was so intrigued that as best-friends and co-writers Gina and I could differ on this point, but it explains a lot about our relative comfort over the years as performers. There’s no disputing that I’m more vivid and energetically myself on stage in Smash Fantastic, just as Gina is obviously transfixing in Arcati Crisis when she settles into playing an original like “Song for Mrs. Schroeder.”

It will be an interesting eight weeks of getting 30 songs ready for this cover gig, but I think I’m even more intrigued by what Gina and I will know about ourselves afterward when we turn our attention back to originals for the first time in three years.

When I started my musical journey half a lifetime ago if you had asked me if I would ever play “Eldery Woman Standing Behind the Counter in a Small Town” to a packed bar at a post-Christmas party in DelCo, my answer would have been, “Hell no.”

I mean, there are few things I enjoy less in life than 90s Pearl Jam, the fickle music tastes of bar crowds, and Christmas. Also, half a lifetime ago I was straightedge. (I’ve always thought Delaware County is pretty decent, though.)

Yet, half-my-age Peter would have been entirely incorrect in his judgmental utterance, because that is just what I found myself doing on the day after Christmas as Ashley and I played our first legit headline appearance as Smash Fantastic.

And you know what? I liked it.

Smash Fantastic mid-song, as shot by Tara B.

All last year Ashley and worked on our repertoire of cover songs as our non-work project together (the teamwork of which made us an even more killer pairing in the office). What started out as a sparse 30 minute set in June has now blossomed into more than three-hours of a mega-pop acoustic jam in which you will quite certainly recognize nearly every song.

This presented a dilemma. Ashley is a Clarkson-level trooper when it comes to wailing through the tricky vocals in our set, but not even The Original Idol herself can rock for that long uninterrupted without getting a little hoarse. Thus, when we scored our DelCo bar gig, it was left to me to quickly add some solo covers to our repertoire to give Ashley an occasional mid-set breather.

Except, Ashley is singing my solo cover repertoire – all Madonna and rocker chicks! She’s doing my “Like a Prayer,” my “Bad Romance,” my “Since U Been Gone” … we even mashed up my formerly solo “Man in the Mirror” into a righteous duet in the original key.

That meant I had to learn to sing songs original performed BY OTHER BOYS. Ugh. Even worse, they couldn’t be a bunch of obscure Rufus Wainwright and Elliott Smith, because the whole point would be to keep the bar crowd interested while Ashley caught her breath.

Thus the Pearl Jam. Everyone knows it and, despite my enduring disdain for Mr. Vedder’s vocals, I can match him pretty effortlessly right down to the warble.

(Not as good as Wes does, though. I really need to record that for posterity at some point.)

After an opening salvo from Ashley, “Elderly Woman” was the first song I played solo. As I started the circular 5-4-1-4-1 chord progression I took a moment to reflect. This is the first time you are ever in a bar playing a song they want to hear, I mused. And they did. I think. It wasn’t the biggest crowd-pleaser of the day (which was surely “We Are Young” or “You & I / What’s Up,” and maybe my “Forget You”), but people nodded in recognition and kept on drinking.

No fleeing the room. No snide, very-audible remarks about my bad singing or theoretical sexual orientation. None of the stuff that I always hate about bar gigs.

At the end of three hours we closed with a killer “Like a Prayer” and encored with “Behind These Hazel Eyes” and a roaring “Rolling in the Deep” and I pronounced with great certainty that we had just played one of my favorite gigs of all time – yes, complete with Christmas and bar and Pearl Jam and all of it. It was 100% fun and 0% stress, and I got to hear three hours of music I love … it just so happened that I was also playing it with one of my friends.

In a weird and slightly twisted way, “Elderly Woman” was the highlight. I might write my own music and prefer to cover Gaga to any guy out there, but when it comes down to it I now have the performance chops and the confidence to hold down the mic on just about anything – whether I actually like the song or not.

As for our repertoire, next up from my most-loathed list is a little number by Jason Mraz.

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